Quantity over Quality: Why Game of Thrones only has 10-episode seasons

Game of Thrones has just concluded its fourth season, ending with an overstuffed finale that divided audiences, as to whether it is the best or worst finale of the series so far. This year, it’s become the biggest moneymaker that HBO has ever had since The Sopranos, a critical and commercial hit that helped restore its reputation after a fallow period of about four-five years, when it was floundering creatively and losing competitively to the likes of AMC and FX.

One of the questions, however, that’s never been satisfactorily answered is why GoT, despite its high ratings, has been getting the short shrift in terms of episodes. That is, why is a GoT season only 10 episodes, as opposed to the 12 or 13 that used to be standard for HBO?

In actuality, the reason for GoT’s thriftiness is quite simple: HBO simply isn’t the network that it used to be. In its creative heyday, arguably between 2000 and 2007, it proudly wore the label “It’s not TV”. 

Under the auspices of Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht, fresh off the massive success of the Sopranos and Sex and the City, it could afford to hemorrhage money on creatively successful, formally experimental and highly expensive shows that would otherwise prove financial failures, such as Carnivale. During this Renaissance period, the network freely granted most of its prestige serial dramas full-length 13-episode orders, as one can see from the first five seasons of The Sopranos (1999-2004), the first three seasons of Six Feet Under (2001-2003) and the first season of The Wire (2002).

The Sopranos

Moreover, it was willing to take long, less rigidly structured breaks between seasons. Whereas networks had to systematically premiere seasons one year apart, HBO could allot 16 months, 18 months, sometimes even more, allowing the personnel more time to work out the new season. This was especially the case with The Sopranos, which premiered its sixth season a whopping two years after the end of the fifth.

Six Feet Under

Around 2003, however, HBO started gradually transitioning towards a 12-episode standard, likely to conserve expenditures somewhat, especially when it came to its most expensive (5-million+/episode) shows. Imagine having about five shows on the air at once, all of which have large budgets and ensemble casts, yet make little money. Removing just one episode from the tail of each season would help save a sizable chunk of money per year.

The Wire

The Wire became a 12-episode show (though the fourth season managed to get a reprieve due to its need to compress a spin-off series focusing on a mayoral election), as did Six Feet Under. Joining them in the 12-episode club would be the three period series Deadwood (2004-2006), Carnivale (2003-2005), and Rome (2005-2007). 

Deadwood

Nonetheless, the long hiatus remained viable. Check out the gaps between the premieres of Carnivale and Rome.

 

Carnivale

Rome

The 12-episode season pretty much remained a constant until the year 2007. By then, the network no longer had its two biggest moneymakers to fall back on, its period serials were failing, the Recession was really taking off. And, not coincidentally, Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss were on their way out. Under the new leadership of Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler, HBO would become more corporatized and more financially responsible. 

Boardwalk Empire

Now, virtually every season would follow the network mode of premiering a year after the previous one, with a strict production cycle that cannot exceed a year and a run of 10 episodes, leading to abbreviated returners like The Wire and Big Love, as well as truncated newbies like Treme and Girls. (To clarify, some of the 10-episode returning shows, such as  Rome, were likely abbreviated prior to the new regime, but in any case HBO was heading towards shorter seasons and less expenditures at this point.) Sure, there’d be a couple of outliers, like True Blood and Boardwalk Empire, but even those shows are now getting truncated orders due to dwindling ratings and growing production costs. Game of Thrones was originally slated to have 12-episode seasons, back when Strauss was still more or less in charge. Check out this excerpt from a 2007 conversation, wherein Benioff and Weiss make it clear that the series is going to have 720 minutes to cover the first season:

Game of Thrones

Evidently, after Lombardo and Piepler took over, they decided to not allow GoT to diverge from their new standards. When Maureen Ryan raised the 10-episode question to the execs following the conclusion of the first season, this was the reply:

True Blood

"If we could do twelve episodes of 'Game of Thrones,' we would," Lombardo said. "They are already in production on the second season. They had to start writing early to actually produce those shows at the level of execution they need, and deliver in time, so we're not asking a consumer to wait more than a year, which we've decided is a mistake. There is no way they could physically do more than ten without us making a decision to dilute the quality of the execution, to have [executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] be less hands-on, which is not, again, what we're about. So I fully appreciate it. I think the only good news is, I hope it lasts for 20 years. You know, I can promise you we won't stop it before it's ready to stop."

(Source: http://www.aoltv.com/2011/07/29/game-of-thrones-hbo-george-martin-future/)

If you think about it, the claim that larger 12-episode orders would dilute quality makes little sense – most people can tell that GoT is forced to cram way too much material into too little a time frame. And that dilutes the show’s potential quality, as it leaves little breathing room, while forcing the writers to cut their scripts down to the bone, rush through developments too quickly and excise crucial scenes of character development and interaction. Even George Martin has repeatedly advocated longer seasons, remaining unconvinced of the benefits of a 10-episode season.

Hidden, however, within this response is the actual reason – the scheduling. Namely, the fact that Benioff and Weiss must “deliver in time, so we're not asking a consumer to wait more than a year, which we've decided is a mistake.” 

In other words, what Lombardo is actually saying is: “If GoT were to get 12 episodes, the show would require at least 2-3 more months of development/production time, which would mean that it couldn’t premiere every April, making the consumer wait over a year. And our policy is not to deprive our clients of the series for more than a year.”

Following the end of GoT season 2, Benioff would pretty much confirm this in an interview with Ryan:

"I would say that, going forward, 10-episode seasons are really all that are possible, given our 12-month [production] cycle," Weiss said. "For this show specifically, it's really all we can do to do 10 of them in a year. I would say not to expect more than 10 a season any time in the near future ... We had always planned on a 10-episode season [for the show's third year]."

(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/game-of-thrones-third-season_n_1416386.html)

To view these extensive breaks as a mistake is a sign that the new regime really favors quantity and timely delivery over quality. If an 18-month break worked fine for the ratings-peak fourth season of The Sopranos, why not GoT? The resolution would be to simply allow GoT 12-episode seasons with longer production cycles and 18-month-long breaks, alternating between premieres in the spring and in the fall. The median quality of an episode would go up, the show runners would have more break time to reenergize and have to take less anti-anxiety pills, while George Martin would have more time to write the books without worrying about the show catching up.

Admittedly, the Stark actors would age faster and likely have to be recast after S3, and there'd be some headaches schedule-wise here and there, but it'd be worth it in the long run, at least when it comes to quality and longevity. (Not to mention that GoT constantly recasts actors, minor and major.)

Sure, right now we get our GoT fixes faster, but we’ll forever be deprived of the great series it could really be, were it to get enough space to breathe. GoT is a very bright star right now, but HBO is burning through it too quickly.